power-profiles-daemon, cpu governors, and xfce 4.20

[plummmm]

xfce4-power-manager has recently (since 4.19.2) had the option to integrate with power-profiles-daemon to add a simple drop down to change the CPU governor. I tried setting this up on an up to date MX 23.5 x64 (XFCE) and ran into a few problems.

The "service" command could autocomplete "power-profiles-daemon", but trying to start it returns "unrecognized device". Upon investigation it looks like there's no sysv script for it, but there is a systemd service in /lib/systemd/system/power-profiles-daemon.service.

I tried starting the daemon binary manually to test it, but changing the drop down in xfce4-power-manager doesn't seem to change the scaling governors listed in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policyX/scaling_governor nor the CPU frequency scaling behaviour. I did confirm that the setting in "powerprofilesctl" is being changed, but it lists the driver for both balanced and power-saver as "placeholder", and no other fields.

I don't know if power-profiles-daemon is just not functional on MX or if I should be using something else to get the same result. It would be nice to have something I can operate from the GUI, ideally the taskbar (a friend has this working perfectly in gnome's little desktop menu thing and I'm very jealous; not jealous enough to use gnome) but I'm not sure where to go from here.

I'm also using an AMD ryzen 3000 series desktop CPU, so there's a lot of CPU scaling going on at any given time. Ideally I'd like a setting that just doesn't ramp as hard under load, said friend's 5000 series can do this. Not sure if my 3000 can or not but, I'm here to learn I suppose.

[wdscharff]

in MXPI cpupower-gui

[jeffreyC]

in MXPI cpupower-gui

Sadly, it is not in the Debian Bookworm repos which MX-23 draws from.
It is in the Debian Bullseye repos (MX-21) and the Debian Trixie (MX-25 to-be) repos.
The deb from Debian Trixie says all dependencies are satisfied in MX-23 when I checked it with gdebi, but I did not install it and try it.

[dreamer]

MX XFCE ships with TLP by default. With default Debian kernel it seems to do a decent job of preserving battery. There seems to be two profiles (AC or battery) that switch automatically. The only thing I modify is that I turn off USB sleep in TLP-UI. Otherwise USB connected printers and scanners may lose connection (maybe not a big problem these days).

Anyway, based on anecdotal info from Mint forum TLP might do a better job of conserving power than power-profiles-daemon.

[plummmm]

Manually installing cpupower-gui from the trixie repos does work, though the UI doesn't translate over to XFCE very well. But it functionally works. Scaling behaviour is different than my friend's 5000 series, they're on a newer kernel and it looks like there were a lot of changes with amd_pstate between 6.1 and 6.4 or so. Might try out AHS and see if that makes a difference.

I'm specifically looking to have a manual option to change power modes on desktop, so no battery state to track. Primarily for noise reasons, my fans ramp up a bit more than I'd like under low thread loads since the CPU boosts the clocks quite strongly in that scenario. Being able to change that behaviour within the OS is very appealing. Though I suppose it would be nice if it kicked into powersave when on UPS power too.

If TLP can do that then I'm all for it. Just a question of the frontend. I'd prefer something more "out of the box" on MX if it works.

[plummmm]

Behaviour under amd_pstate was strange. It seemed to boost a bit harder under low load but sometimes all core load would only boost one CCD. After changing settings around it behaved more "normally" but there was no real "use less power please" setting I could find. The primarily difference is that it would drop the minimum clock down to 550 instead of 2200, which isn't particularly helpful in my case.

I also tried TLP but it didn't seem to actually change any settings upon save, using tlp-ui. I tried 1.5 and also used 1.8 with a combination of the testing repo for tlp and the flatpak for tlp-ui. Same behaviour between both. cpupower-gui still worked.

I'm back on the normal kernel now and will probably just use cpupower-gui for the time being, or rig up a script. It'd be nice if this worked via the XFCE4 power manager though.

[Eadwine Rose]

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